In finally catching up with my blog reading, I came across a piece in Edu in Review about the prevalence of websites that help college students cheat. Basically, there is an “arms race” between cheaters and professors, or rather, between the nerds that are sympathetic to the respective sides. The teachers have Turnitin.com, the students have a plethora of peer-to-peer paper exchange networks. Recognition algorithms are constantly updated, and ways to beat the system are constantly discovered. And so it goes.
So I got to thinking. The people who go about setting up the cheating schemes and infrastructures are geniuses. Remember Napster? Brilliant. And one of the founders of Napster, Sean Parker went on to much success in the tech world (and will be played by Justin Timberlake in the upcoming movie The Social Network). When I was at UCSB, there was a student who set up a file-sharing client for our campus that utilized its T1 network for movie and music downloads over 1 megabyte per second, unheard of in those dark ages of 2002. These aren’t examples of academic dishonesty, but Napster was certainly considered cheating at the time.
Lest anyone get the wrong idea, academic dishonesty is a bad thing. It is lying. I’m not championing the cause of the cheater, but I am impressed with the innovation behind it. Napster was part of a wave that changed the rules of the music business, paving the way for Rhapsody, the iTunes store, and Pandora.
The students who design, code, and implement these underground networks showcase the traits that mover/shaker companies want to see: talent, diligence, vision, and the ability to address a [black] market need. And the amount of work they put in is certainly much greater than they can hope to gain from using other people’s term papers. What we’re talking about here are side-projects that become paradigm changers.
Remember the movie Slackers? Some of their stunts were downright brilliant, and that type of imagination is what companies crave these days.
Students who use databases and peer-to-peer networks to pass off other’s work as their own are cheating themselves out of education. But the people who invent these networks ought to be given at least some credit for the products they’ve created. After all, nothing new or innovative ever came from following a line of rules down the middle of the road.
Be the first to give a HOOT!